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It's a requirements change. Those happen all the time in everything. Why would that be completely forbidden or impossible here? Like you said, it might really s

It's a requirements change. Those happen all the time in everything. Why would that be completely forbidden or impossible here? Like you said, it might really suck. But the NRC does not allow trading off safety the way you suggest.

jacquesm 4y ago
Requirements changes are not driven by one-off material defects in critical pieces of hardware. That's simply a bending of the rules for economic reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and that at the root of every one of those disaster and near disasters there was someone who thought they could get away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with this kind of responsibility, especially across a timeframe measures in decades. At the same time I would love to see us solve the climate change problem, and I recognize that we will likely have a nuclear component in there. But it will have to be done by the book or we'll end up regretting it - again. If we're going to start out with the normalization of deviance on the #1 critical component of a reactor then I think we are on the wrong path: https://becht.com/becht-blog/entry/normalization-of-deviance-the-pathway-to-disaster/ https://becht.com/becht-blog/entry/normalization-of-deviance...
- otter-rock 4y ago
  I see your concerns, and I think you're probably just unaware that they're addressed better than you know, but in a different way than you'd expect. When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped. Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example. With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country. It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now. Nobody is normalizing or bending anything. Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis. There is no deviance from the safety requirements. Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't believe in magic or appeals to authority, I believe in physics and once you start bending the rules for one part who is to tell where it will stop. Having one leg too short won't be fixed by making the other one a little longer. The materials science requirements on nuclear reactor vessels are such that if the safety margins are so narrow that the specs are going to be even possible to be violated by a manufacturing defect that you have a problem anyway, either in the selection of your manufacturing partners, your design process, your risk assessment, your QA or all of the above. For me that breaks trust at a level that I'm not going to buy the 'we'll fix it by using better parts somewhere else' argument. The stated defect has effects that can only be properly ascertained by destructive testing and since the whole point was that there was only one of these that leaves a large part of the end result in the realm of 'hope' and 'belief', neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan. And because 'safety' is the only one that doesn't show up in the books that's where my worry would be. 'special teams' don't amount to much, we've had special teams all along and a long series of fuck ups. This is exactly the problem.
    - otter-rock 4y ago
      Ok, you obviously have zero interest in an actual discussion, lest it confront your completely fabricated "facts". So for anyone else who's genuinely interested in more than just pontificating their own bs, the "special teams" this person mocked, rather than asked about, can be learned about here: https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/risk-informed.html https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/risk-informed.html
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        No, that's not how it works. See the FAA and many other institutions where commerce, one upmanship and all kinds of other considerations besides the actual work ended up trumping what should have been done in the first place. I don't think the nuclear power industry is immune to that sort of thing. This kind of thinking is what brought down the spaceshuttle. Three Mile Island (US), Windscale (UK), Chernobyl (Then USSR, now Ukraine) and Fukushima (Japan) all had the very best teams assigned to their design, construction and operations and yet each of those had a major accident. There isn't anything fabricated about these facts so you can extend your appeal to authority but I'm just not buying it: people will always be people and the day that you start bending the rules on the design requirements is the day that I bow out. Obviously that isn't going to move the needle but it is exactly why I don't trust the nuclear industry: way too much did not go according to plan even if it always was with the best of intentions. And that's before we get into non-proliferation, waste and other considerations. Trust has to be earned. Also, you should probably lay off the personal attacks.

jacquesm 4y ago

Requirements changes are not driven by one-off material defects in critical pieces of hardware. That's simply a bending of the rules for economic reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and that at the root of every one of those disaster and near disasters there was someone who thought they could get away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with this kind of responsibility, especially across a timeframe measures in decades. At the same time I would love to see us solve the climate change problem, and I recognize that we will likely have a nuclear component in there. But it will have to be done by the book or we'll end up regretting it - again. If we're going to start out with the normalization of deviance on the #1 critical component of a reactor then I think we are on the wrong path: https://becht.com/becht-blog/entry/normalization-of-deviance-the-pathway-to-disaster/ https://becht.com/becht-blog/entry/normalization-of-deviance...

otter-rock 4y ago
I see your concerns, and I think you're probably just unaware that they're addressed better than you know, but in a different way than you'd expect. When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped. Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example. With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country. It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now. Nobody is normalizing or bending anything. Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis. There is no deviance from the safety requirements. Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't believe in magic or appeals to authority, I believe in physics and once you start bending the rules for one part who is to tell where it will stop. Having one leg too short won't be fixed by making the other one a little longer. The materials science requirements on nuclear reactor vessels are such that if the safety margins are so narrow that the specs are going to be even possible to be violated by a manufacturing defect that you have a problem anyway, either in the selection of your manufacturing partners, your design process, your risk assessment, your QA or all of the above. For me that breaks trust at a level that I'm not going to buy the 'we'll fix it by using better parts somewhere else' argument. The stated defect has effects that can only be properly ascertained by destructive testing and since the whole point was that there was only one of these that leaves a large part of the end result in the realm of 'hope' and 'belief', neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan. And because 'safety' is the only one that doesn't show up in the books that's where my worry would be. 'special teams' don't amount to much, we've had special teams all along and a long series of fuck ups. This is exactly the problem.
  - otter-rock 4y ago
    Ok, you obviously have zero interest in an actual discussion, lest it confront your completely fabricated "facts". So for anyone else who's genuinely interested in more than just pontificating their own bs, the "special teams" this person mocked, rather than asked about, can be learned about here: https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/risk-informed.html https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/risk-informed.html
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      No, that's not how it works. See the FAA and many other institutions where commerce, one upmanship and all kinds of other considerations besides the actual work ended up trumping what should have been done in the first place. I don't think the nuclear power industry is immune to that sort of thing. This kind of thinking is what brought down the spaceshuttle. Three Mile Island (US), Windscale (UK), Chernobyl (Then USSR, now Ukraine) and Fukushima (Japan) all had the very best teams assigned to their design, construction and operations and yet each of those had a major accident. There isn't anything fabricated about these facts so you can extend your appeal to authority but I'm just not buying it: people will always be people and the day that you start bending the rules on the design requirements is the day that I bow out. Obviously that isn't going to move the needle but it is exactly why I don't trust the nuclear industry: way too much did not go according to plan even if it always was with the best of intentions. And that's before we get into non-proliferation, waste and other considerations. Trust has to be earned. Also, you should probably lay off the personal attacks.